that were to follow.
When Harvey woke the following morning, the sun was once again pouring through a crack in the curtains, but this time it lay in a warm pool on the pillow beside him. He sat up with a shout and a smile, and either one or the other (and sometimes both) remained on his lips for the rest of the day.
There was plenty to do. Work on the tree house in the spring morning, followed by food, and the laying of plans for the afternoon. Games and lazy hours in the heat of summer—sometimes with Wendell, sometimes with Lulu—then adventures by the light of a harvest moon. And finally, when the winter wind had blown out the flames in the pumpkin heads, and carpeted the grounds with snow, chilly fun for them all out in the frosty air, and a warm Christmas welcome when they were done.
It was a day of holidays, the third as fine as the second, and the fourth as fine as the third, and very soon Harvey began to forget that there was a dull world out beyond the wall, where the great beast February was still sleeping its tedious sleep.
His only real reminder of the life he’d left—besides a second telephone call he’d made to his mom and dad just to tell them all was well—was the present he’d wished for, and received, that first Christmas: his ark. He’d thought several times of trying it out on the lake, to see if it would float, but it wasn’t until the afternoon of the seventh day that he got around to doing so.
Wendell had made a real glutton of himself at lunch, and had declared that it was far too hot to play, so Harvey wandered down to the lake on his own, with the ark tucked under his arm. He half expected-hoped, in fact to find Lulu down there to keep him company, but the banks of the lake were empty.
Once he laid eyes on the gloomy waters he almost gave upon the idea of a launching, but that meant admitting something to himself that he didn’t wish to admit, so he headed on down to the shore, found a rock to perch on that looked less precarious than the others, and set his ark on the water.
It floated well, he was pleased to see. He pushed it to and fro for a little while, then lifted it out and peered inside to see if it was leaking. It was quite watertight, however, so he set it back on the lake and pushed it out again.
As he did so, he caught sight of a fish rising from the bottom of the lake, its mouth wide open, as if it intended to swallow his little vessel whole. He reached out to snatch the ark from the water before it was either sunk or devoured, but in his haste he lost his footing on the slime-slickened rock, and with a cry he fell into the lake.
The water was icy cold, and eager. It quickly closed over his head. He flailed wildly, trying not to imagine the dark depths beneath him, or the vast maw of the fish that had been rising from those depths. Turning his face up toward the surface, he started to swim.
He could see his ark floating above him, capsized by his fall. Its lead passengers were already sinking. He didn’t try and save them, but surfaced-gasping for breath—and paddled toward the shore. It wasn’t much of a distance. In less than a minute he was hauling himself up onto the rocks and scrambling away from the bank, water pouring from his sleeves and trousers and shoes. Only when his feet were well clear of the lake, and no hungry fish could snap at his toes, did he drop down onto the ground.
Though it was midsummer, and the sun was blazing somewhere overhead, the air around the lake was cold, and he soon began to shiver. Before he made his way out into the sun, however, he looked for some sign of his ark. The spot where it had sunk was marked by a forlorn flotilla of wreckage, all of which would soon join the rest of the ark at the bottom.
Of the fish that had seemed so eager to devour him there was no sign. Perhaps it had swum down into the depths to chew on the drowned menagerie. If so, Harvey hoped it choked on its dinner.
He’d lost plenty of toys before. He’d had a brand new bicycle—his prize possession!—stolen from the step of his house two birthdays ago. But this loss upset him as much; more, in fact. The idea that the lake now had something that he’d owned was somehow worse than a thief running off with his bike. A thief was warm flesh and blood; the lake was not. His possessions had gone into a nightmare place, full of monstrous things, and he felt as though a little part of himself had gone with it, down into the dark.
He walked away from the lake without looking back, but the breeze that came to warm his face when he broke through the thicket, and the sound of birds that pleased his ear, could not keep from his mind the thought he’d tried to ignore when he’d gone down to the water. Despite all entertainments that the Holiday House supplied so eagerly, it was a haunted place, and however hard he had tried to ignore his doubts and suppress his questions, they could be ignored and suppressed no longer. Whoever, or whatever, that haunter was, Harvey could not be content now until he’d seen its face and knew its nature.
IX. What Do You Dream?
Harvey didn’t mention what had happened at the lake to anyone—not even Lulu—in part because he felt stupid for falling in and in part because the House tried so hard to please him in the days that followed that he almost forgot about the accident entirely. That very night, in fact, he found a piece of colored string with his name tag on it at the base of the Christmas tree, and followed it through the House to find a new bike—even more splendid than the one he’d lost two years before—waiting for him.
But that was just the first of many fine surprises the Holiday House sprang in quick succession. One morning, for instance, Wendell and Harvey climbed up into the tree house to discover that the branches around it were swarming with parrots and monkeys. Another day, in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner, Mrs. Griffin called them through into the living room, where the flames of the fire had taken on the shapes of dragons and heroes, and were doing fiery battle in the grate. And in the heat of one lazy afternoon, Harvey was wakened from a doze by a chorus of shouts and found a troupe of mechanical acrobats performing clockwork-defying feats on the lawn.
The greatest surprise, however, began with the appearance of one of Rictus’s siblings.
“My name is Jive,” he said, stepping out of the early evening murk at the top of the stairs. Every muscle in his body seemed to be in motion: tics, jigs and jitterings that had wasted him away until he barely cast a shadow. Even his hair, which was a mass of oiled curls, seemed to hear some crazed rhythm. It writhed on his scalp in a knotted frenzy.
“Brother Rictus sent me along to see how you’re doin’,” he said, his tones succulent.
“I’m doing fine,” Harvey replied. “Did you say Brother Rictus?”
“We’re from the same brood, loosely speaking,” Jive said. “I hope you call your family now and then.”
“Yep” said Harvey. “I called them yesterday.”
“Are they missin’ you?”
“Didn’t sound like it”
“Are you missin’ them?”
Harvey shrugged. “Not really,” he said.
(This wasn’t strictly true—he had his homesick days—but he knew if he went back home he’d be in school the day after, and wishing he’d stayed in the Holiday House a while longer,)
“You’re going to make the most of bein’ here then?” said Jive, practicing a weird little dance step up and down the stairs.
“Yeah,” said Harvey. “I just want to have fun.”
“Who doesn’t?” Jive grinned, “who doesn’t?” He sidled up to Harvey, and whispered: “Speakin’ of fun…”
“What?’’ said Harvey.
“You never did get Wendell back for that trick of his.”
“No, I didn’t,” said Harvey.
“Why the heck not?”
“I could never think of a way.”
“Oh I’m sure we could cook something up between the two of us,” Jive replied mischievously.
“It has to be something he’ll never think of,” Harvey said.
